At the core of all the adventures (or misadventures) of a teleserye, the Philippine soap opera, there is but one important element that is often undervalued, simply because many people have been conditioned (perhaps by class consciousness or education) to dismiss it for its tawdry performance and lack of sophistication: love, romance. But romance is a timeless theme, even in the high literatures of both the East and the West. Thus the dis-ease comes to us very curiously since it basically has been propelling all thinkable plots in all of literary history.

All histories (that is fictional or real) are basically narratives of love, animated by desire for the other, fired by this desire which compels people to move mountains, so to speak, and even to come up with all sorts of tropes and treatises. This desire for the other is structured on a premise of possibility, where two individuals could eventually become one—and this precisely is the focal point of all orchestrations of fictional fulfilment or impediments. In the classical narrative sense, a tragic one directs us to frustration; a comic one, though traditionally sporting distortion, promises attainment. The possibilities of love commence depending on the trajectories.

Love is not lost on the teleserye as it is its important element. As a popular cultural text framed by the importance of the basic social unit of the family, it thrives by perpetrating the strengthening of this institution, which weathers the storms and becomes, in the end, a stronghold of characters. Any aggression towards an individual is an aggression towards the family. In our current social disposition of various familial dysfunctions, the teleserye family, as in Angel Locsin’s The Legal Wife, Piolo Pascual’s Hawak Kamay, or Sharon Cuneta’s Madame Chairman, the recovery of any form of equilibrium, by all means, is a necessary resolution to all present conflicts.

The love of the family, as well as the love between family members, situates the character as part of the institution, which is the primal symbolic order—which is also what governs the laws of friendship. Friends are like family, and they usually play the role of the other voice providing perspective and foresight. The recent resurgence of the “best friend” figure embodies this philic love. Every time Matet de Leon’s Rowena bathes Maja Salvador’s Nicole in the choicest sarcasm, she acts as a mirror that only shows genuine love and concern, despite the uncouthness, which the audience loves, and even discourses in social media. All the unrelated figures performing some didactic roles in teleseryes are basically to be considered philic.

But love above all is the fulfillment of the eros, the commencement of the romantic unity. And this unity may be prevented by certain things, at the very least: poverty, a familial difference (usually between two warring political or feudal families), or circumstances, natural or man-made. In her articulations of the romance plots of popular novels, the poet and scholar Joi Barrios mentioned of capsizing ships or volcanic eruptions as preventing couples from eloping.

The idea of love in popular texts, as in a teleserye, is to purify the feelings, to heighten desire, to reiterate the fragmentality of one without the other, en route to the romantic fulfillment. Love is the expression, as affection, as it also is the very journey by which this feeling, this articulation is narrated. While love is told, several other discourses are consequently implicated, like notions of differences, aside from the obvious character polarities. Our value system upholds the belief that love must be a way of bridging disparities since it is the universal forger of relations, the closer of all arcs. But it is, in a way, also a creator of forgery, as it offers givens, which if left uncontested only perpetrate particular ideologies.

Yesterday, I listened to a lecture by the scholar Resil Mojares, who revaluated—in the language of theory, “metacriticized”—his own “blind spots” in a 1979 study of published Cebuano popular fiction. In his clearly empirical survey, he uncovered in the stories the configuration of the “poor boy-rich girl/poor girl-rich boy” plot formula he called in “gugmang kabus” and demonstrated “the value in analyzing “symbolic action” (enactments on a symbolic plane of social desires and fantasies) in large masses of Philippine literary texts, as a way of understanding Filipino popular mentality.”

Though his arguments centered on the need for a larger, more encompassing study of Philippine regional literatures, his analysis directed me towards important insights on Philippine literary romance that may also be found in teleseryes, the subject of my recent studies. Truly, gugmang kabus is still a configuration very much entrenched in Philippine literature and popular culture, though in a follow up question which delved on the current landscape of romance plots and character configuration, I felt that there were very notable differences, especially in the observable placement of male figures in the privileged position (rich, educated, mobile).

Mojares, if I am not mistaken, observed that the prevalence of rich male characters may be associated with the observable lack of women writers in his survey (there were only two, he said). This was in the 1920s, or course, and the tenor was obviously patriarchal (but aren’t we still patriarchal, in the first place?). In the discussions that ensued, I offered some insights about the configurations of the plots, particularly of the teleserye, since, in the earlier part of his lecture, he mentioned a similarity of the plots with that of a recently concluded feudal teleserye, Ikaw Lamang.

I surmised that there are now new configurations, though the traditional (patriarchal, feudal) value system still shapes our collective imagination of class or gender relations. This is not surprising if we consider that the creation of plots and characters, particularly in the teleserye, is borne out of sophisticated market research initiatives, creative brainstorming and pitches, as well as the expected scrutiny and intervention of network management, which puts weight on market opinion. It was easy to conclude that the domination of male writers in the 1920s may explain male prominence in terms of class and gender in popular fiction.

Today, the complex authorship of the teleserye shapes how romantic figures rise and fall. Today’s authorial processes in teleseryes may not easily lend explanation about the configurations of characters. For the most part, I still think that love is still the point of the conquest, whether the characters are poor or not, or merely part of the struggling middle class, since, as many scholars have already observed, much of what we see on Pinoy television drama today are basically fantasy productions that peddle ideas of social mobility or acceptance, as in the case of bolder teleseryes like My Husband’s Lover.

Love remains to be an important literary value as it bestows equity, where class or gender differences are bridged, or where circumstances are undermined, in the name of romantic consummation. Love and its fulfilment are great equalizers, and each possibility is a narrative that animates all consciousness. The world at every turn of history may be enveloped by cynicism, but love in all its myth, is expected to conquer all. Love is a myth, and it is also mythic, and all generations will definitely need their share of its stories too.

Here’s one that finally recovers the myths and legends of Filipino folklore—Edgar Calabia Samar’s Janus Silang at ang Tiyanak ng Tabon (Adarna House, 2014), the first in a series of young adult novels featuring a teenage online gamer from a fictional town called Balanga. The character is caught in a quagmire of mysterious deaths eventually to be related to his addicting game called TALA or the Terra Anima Legion of Anitos, reminiscent of the popular Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) fame.

The first book exposes high school student Janus’s world and his situation, and builds on a crisis that at first was considered personal by the hero, the lone survivor of gaming deaths in his hometown. The complication arises when national media covers the spate of deaths that apparently happened in other localities in the country. After discovering his past, Janus begins his journey in this book, and finds himself in a path back to the indigenous, a rich mine of material Samar has been tapping through his earlier novels Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog, and Sa Kasunod ng 909.

Samar’s gripping prose sets up the world of Janus as resonant though ordinary—and marginal if it may be said. The gesture of beginning the journey in the locality of Balanga prefigures the project of enriching the Filipino young adult literary tradition with a return to the indigenous, oftentimes sidetracked by staple middle-class and cosmopolitan depictions.

Samar contributes to the growing corpus of writings by creating an exciting story bold enough to decenter the norm and present the horrific otherness of the figure of the tiyanak, which is emblematic not only of the complexity of the fictional TALA game, but also of the intricacy of Philippine culture, the well-spring of the series’ story. What is more remarkable is the fact that the novel redeems the tiyanak from the Christianized imagination of this unnerving creature. From a babe that failed to receive the grace of baptism, Samar re-imagines its history of “evil” by connecting it with the Tabon Man, perhaps the oldest artifact of Philippine history. This turn to history and archeological discovery establishes the undercurrent of myth-making Samar employs to provide an altogether unique and suspenseful reading experience grounded on truly Filipino material.

Moreover, Janus is an exciting character that may easily remind of young adult figures enjoyed by generations of readers. As a boy about to pursue a destiny, he finds himself coping with the concerns of his age—performance in school, social acceptance, early pain, and technological over-immersion, which brought him to his situation in the first place. Janus however is not merely one poster boy of the downsides of internet addictions, since he breathes and lives as a very self-aware character. Janus speaks for an internet savvy generation oftentimes misunderstood and misjudged, especially with regards to perceived “illiteracies”.

The children of the “Janus generation”, some say, have very low attention spans and would easily put down books for more stimulating virtual experiences. Janus however is compelled to confront the competing worlds by the very conflict he faces—fairly symptomatic of the kind of engagements of the youth of today. The virtual, on the one hand—that is the world of the TALA—transports itself in the real world of Janus, and this is where we are offered a glimpse of the blur between these two conflicting worlds. In a manner of speaking, Janus’s myth sings of the very interesting life of border-crossing young Filipinos, who for want of better things to believe find themselves searching in various thresholds of postmodern, value-deferred experiences.

Janus sings a new myth for young adult Filipinos on the cusp of change. With the awareness that the portal of the epoch is the world wide web, Samar emphasizes through the novel—and most probably, through the novels to come—that the recovery of certain “national” memories is but a strategic return to the originary meanings of the word “entertain”—to keep up, to maintain, to hold together. TALA the game is there to entertain, amuse; to provide refuge for the young souls embarking on virtual journeys, hopefully, back to native terrains of heroism and adventure. Janus proposes a new way of reimagining crusades by using the Filipino young adult novel as a vehicle of “keeping up” or “holding together” a Filipino value system considered lost to this generation.

Delivered at the University of the Philippines Writers Club Lecture Series, Recto Hall, Faculty Center, University of the Philippines, Diliman, February 18, 2015.

Photo of Jodi Santamaria as Amor Powers, courtesy of Starpinay.com.

It may sound curious, our configuration of two keywords—originality and teleserye—but reading them together proves to exemplify what Lucilla Hosillos once called the Filipino Literary Achievement. Despite the dissatisfaction of many for its being formulaic, predictable, and derivative, as well as its perceived incapacity to “upgrade with Hollywood Level”, the teleserye, 15 years after it had finally earned a name, has distinguished itself as a distinct Filipino cultural text by precisely being the drama of the Filipino local. Etymologically, drama is performance, and for Doreen Fernandez, performance as “palabas” signifies two meanings: “Palabas indeed it all is—performance, show, entertainment, fun. Palabas—outward—it also is: people-based and community oriented.”

However, what is unsaid in this explication of palabas is the very internality or paloob that it requires, one that enables this outward movement to begin with. The teleserye, as the Filipino soap opera, may be seen as both an internalization and externalization of the Filipino experience in this wide-reaching, border-crossing televisual medium. It is our palabas, as externalized in creation, production, dissemination, and consumption. It is also our palabas, as internalized in our constant search for national identity. We may have missed the point of signification, but 15 years ago, the soap opera in the Philippines sought a linguistic turn by identifying itself as teleserye, in the advent of the emergence global soap operas like the Latin American telenovela and the Asian drama in Philippine television. It may be surmised that the primary landmark of its originality is the daring to give itself a name.

This capacity to dare, this decolonizing gesture of naming, may not be found in the object of calling the soap the teleserye. It was, anyway, a simple network brand in the first place, a mere marketing strategy to distinguish a Filipino soap opera for the new millennium, Pangako Sa ‘Yo. The soap opera then had more promises than the word, but the word stayed on in broadcasting consciousness, at least, to be used by all networks in referring to their soap operas, and to soap operas in general. One may prove this discursive practice by simply going to the respective websites of the networks and typing “teleserye” in the built-in search engines, or even surveying entertainment news reports available in video format. The word, to this day, however stays true to its neologistic nature—it is disputably mainstream, but it has yet to be registered in repositories of Filipino discourses, foremost of which is the UP DIksiyonaryong Filipino, despite considerable public use.

Quite recently, chancing upon a project I was once involved with, spearheaded by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, an ingenious archive of Filipino cultural icons for distribution in the schools and libraries, I was surprised to discover that the word “telenovela” from Latin America was archived, but not the teleserye. I immediately volunteered to revise the entry, since, the telenovela was eventually subsumed under the teleserye—which is historically more circumspect, and more preferential to our cultural discourse, all things considered. While the telenovela may be said to be the catalyst for revolutionizing the Filipino dramatic genre, and while it has also entered our discursive consciousness (since for a time, it had been used to refer to soap operas, like Mula sa Puso), it had remained to be what it is: the foreign, similarly-colonized televisual product that resonated with us by way of Marimar and her tropical dreams and fantasies.

However, it would be facile to merely undermine the Latin American telenovela, and its pivotal role in the rise of the Philippine teleserye. After all, both share not only what may be called the vernacularized colonial language (the local enunciations of the Spanish for Mexicans, Venezuelans, and Columbians, and bits and pieces of the same in our national language, Filipino), but also embedded histories of colonial upheavals, political instability, and economic disarray, that animate their respective dramatic worldviews. Also, the Latin American Telenovela may be just as old as the Philippine soap opera, with the former being perhaps a few years its senior. Both began in the 1960s, with the telenovela curiously emerging from other names, such as “teleteatro”. When the two converged in Philippine space, in the threshold of the new millennium, the Philippine soap opera was still emerging from the return of democratized broadcasting after the Marcos regime, and was awaiting to be transformed, not only by the diaspora of filmmakers and writers to television, but also by the constant demand for foreign dramatic texts in the market.

Marimar propelled the process, and offered to the Filipino market a viable alternative: a more compact and engaging plot with a more time-bound seriality. Take note that it had not really reinvented the romance that we have learned to love; I remember clearly that people followed Marimar because it was fast-paced. No looking for a lost diary for three dragging weeks, like in Mara Clara‘s. The reaction of the broadcasting industry was radical, and it involved a reconfiguration of programming landscapes. Mara Clara, ABS-CBN’s strongest afternoon soap was deployed to battle it out with Marimar and her talking dog. Around this time too, GMA 7 was reconfiguring its primetime, which led to its first primetime drama offering, Kadenang Kristal. If there is any word to this describe this event, it must be resistance, but not in the way that Raymond Williams described it in his Keywords entry on “reactionary”, which is to react to “particular kinds of change”, but more so, to reiterate that it has its own self to bring to bear. Change was bound to happen anytime soon (as it was a “revolutionary” period, anyway), and the telenovela, spectral of our very own colonialism and feudal imaginaries, “incited” in a way, our soap opera revolution.

To be original is to have an access to the source or to launch beginnings, and for Hosillos, literary originality is a means to carry out vengeance by way of assimilating, transmuting foreign elements and influences for “(our) own purposes”, considering our postcolonial realities. Hosillos has observed that same capacity to “transcend the foreign materials that inevitably influenced” Filipino literary works, from the Hiligaynon balac to the Philippine Educational Theater Association’s dupluhang bayan which she has called the “total theater”. This may also be the case for the teleserye, not only during its moment of inception, but also during the course of its proliferation, after the Marimar and the telenovela fever. Sure, the broadcast industry reacted by presenting a more compact, more time-bound, competitive version of the soap opera, but it certainly had a more original sense of what it had wanted to dramatize.

We may point out too easily the many similarities between the telenovela and the teleserye (and it would not surprise us at all, considering the affinities), but the teleserye, as a showcase of Filipino dexterity, has achieved originality by transcending imitation and up to this writing, still transmuting “foreign elements into original works that are truly Filipino” and in one way or another embodying “relevance to social consciousness and the development of nationalism.” In her critical work, Hosillos emphasized that this assessment of literary achievement may only be done extensively, that is, with other works in consideration, and the teleserye fits perfectly this kind of assessment since it is continuously produced and reinvented. While we accept the fact of inconsistency in production quality, the oeuvre of the past 15 years already compels for a vigorous appraisal of the teleserye after it had proclaimed independence from the telenovela, which practically gave birth to it, and which is another text for comparativity. The breadth of the materials, along with the challenging work of archiving information about each of them, makes the task rather quixotic, but nevertheless necessary, if only to show not only how we have managed to create a soap opera of our own, but also how far we have come in shaping the continuing Filipino narrative.

In a way, the closedness or terminality of the word telenovela (as in television novel) already signifies a kind of fixity that we had to negotiate with as we were apprehending its procrustean and Western form. The novel, no matter the length, will end, and this is, of course, rhetorical for the much lamented idea of speed, a very contemporary and nevertheless western concept that enthralled us in Marimar. In contrast, our narratives—from our folk epics and myths to perhaps the Noli and Fili, which had invited sequels and allusions from not a few of our novelists—indulged in seriality, re-emergences, resurrections, even it it turns out to be grotesque, as in the Filipino telenovela Mula sa Puso, where the villain seemed to have had nine lives and had to be violently expunged from the face of the earth in the soap’s ending. That’s more than poetic justice for me. This perhaps explains not only the aptness but also the originality of the term teleserye, as particularly indicative of the kind of narrative that we intended to perform. Our’s is a culture that lingers to hear of stories memorized, that thrives in plot and character complexity, that attends to adventures (and even misadventures) that seem to only always trick us since they lead to darker groves where valiant men are tied to trees and ceaselessly grieving their usurped fates. Yes, the world is used to multi-character, multigenerational plots, but our concept of multiplicity in Pangako Sa ‘Yo, the very first teleserye, was indeed multiplicitous.

On the one hand, a love story of the past was presented in Pangako Sa ‘Yo, between a maid and an hacienda heir, and their love would prove to be epical because of the many years of chasing that unfolded. But the story was not yet over, since, in a manner of mirroring, a similar love story would emerge, this time involving the initial pair’s love daughter and a boy the hacienda heir would consider a son for quite a while. The configuration in itself was already complex, and it was made more complex not only by the twists and turns of the story, but also by the introduction of various individuals that would get entangled with the characters. The nature of the serye in this case is very much observable, and despite the soap’s being shaped by the romance mode, where endings always call for weddings, the seriality—the web of interrelations not only of events, but also of individual encounters—illustrates the distinction of the teleserye from the telenovela. It may look like a telenovela, but it is certainly not one. It may have been compact and fast-paced already, but it refuses to be completely colonized, just as Hosillos has described, in the case of the Philippine Literatures she has revaluated.

There is still however Hosillos’ requirement of works to embody “relevance to social consciousness and the development of nationalism” to consider. Is the teleserye, despite its commercial underpinnings, capable of avenging “with originality to create literary works of artistic significance even in (its) Filipinoness”? For her, “(i)t appears that Filipino writers who transmuted foreign influence into literary achievement of originality were primarily concerned with such transmutations in terms of their personal experiences and social realities.” Pangako Sa ‘Yo, the very first teleserye, immediately located itself in a time and place recognizably ours, where the struggle for land is unending, and the city is but merely boulders upon boulders of trash. Politics was also tackled by the teleserye, and what better way to expose its seething corruption than a dramatization of a festive local elections? Our teleseryes have not gone far from these realities, even if the discussions were peripheral. The very fact that they exist shows how they have became spectral, hounding us even in our fantasy teleserye worlds, from the barrios or urban jungles of Coching and Ravelo superheroes to the imagined realms of Encantadia. When characters in Philippine popular culture desire to find or heal themselves, they usually go abroad, to the middle class fantasy of the United States, but that trope too had also been overcome.

When a teleserye character is relocated abroad, it is more recently in the contemporaneous context of the Overseas Filipino Worker, at once viewing the foreign land as tourist, and as a subjected migrant laborer. And we have gone so far from depicting the absented individual—usually just a picture in a frame, a voice from the telephone receiver or a tape recording, or an image in a video call. The individual is now imagined in the land of the foreign, among foreign peoples, struggling to make ends meet, in the name of a better future for the family, and making the experience more estranged for the audience. I suppose, we have to thank the Koreanovelas for fuelling our dreams of flight, as seen in the local adaptations of Only You, Lovers in Paris, and even A Beautiful Affair. The teleserye has also participated in historical retrospectives, providing imaginations of our past and heritage, particularly the Spanish colonial period. While most have only remained within the vicinity of romancing the hagiographic and the heroic, like the recent Jose Rizal biopic Ilustrado, there have been notable instances of historical representations like De Buena Familia, and Amaya, a story of an indigene warrior from precolonial Philippines, and loosely based in Panay folk literatures. There was also the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Noli Me Tangere which should have been given space in major networks to reorient audiences with Rizal’s founding narrative.

The teleserye, being the drama of the Filipino local, has managed to locate our experiences. In a way, it has become a parallel narrative to our current historical unfolding, providing retrospects, reflections, and prescience, even in seemingly domestic episodes. The particular is embroiled with the pervasive, in such a way that the two parallel narratives—our historical time and the creative temporality of the teleserye—converge in certain instances. Pangako Sa ‘Yo has alluded to the Payatas tragedy in delineating the life of Amor Powers after her banishment from the hacienda. In an earlier episode, parallel shots were done to show her beloved’s arranged marriage to her eventual archrival, alongside her own miserable state in the dumps, as she was finding out about the wedding from a discarded newspaper society page. She exclaims, just as man and wife were being pronounced: lahat ng hirap at sakit na ibinigay ninyo sa akin, ibabalik ko! This dialogue echoed the same misery and desire for vengeance of people from the dumpsters, of the marginalized in general, as seen in the opening of the soap where the Payatas tragedy was recreated, a pivotal event in the teleserye’s time that spelled the initial fates of the characters. Curiously, political references in history, like that of the Marcos dictatorship, have also been referred to by the teleserye, and this was followed by other teleseryes, like Kris Aquino’s Kailangan Ko’y Ikaw, which dramatized the suicide of a police general in a memorial park, weeks after former Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff Gen. Angelo Reyes took his life in front of his mother’s grave, being embroiled in a government scandal.

In another front, the use of the national language, and the embedding of the other national languages also articulates located experiences: countering the basic gahum or hegemony of English, which for a time was the language of Philippine broadcasting discourse. Today, English is not really phased out, but is merely embedded in the Filipino corpus, as part of this growing medium slowly defining itself as “national language”. Drama has played a big part in this process, though is yet to be more inclusive to really avenge the minoritized Philippine culture and employ the fullest blunt of decolonization. One can just think of the example of the long forgotten Isabel, Sugo ng Birhen, a landmark in relocating the teleserye locality to that of Cebu, even if it meant dramatizing the experience of a Marian miracle using their own enunciation of Tagalog. Isabel was an exemplar in teleserye decentering, one that could also be seen in the most recent production of Maria Flordeluna, parts of which were shot in Cebu, and the currently running Forevermore, which relocated its story in Baguio, and used snippets of Ilocano for verisimilitude’s sake. We need more archipelagic consciousness in our teleseryes.

“The question of originality,” wrote Hosillos, “is crucial to assessing Filipino cultural achievement.” She continued: “It can be asked: what is original about a culture that bears the diverse cultural influences of other nations?” In this discussion of the teleserye, we cited/sited the instances of its breaking away from the catalytic text that is the Latin American telenovela, tracing its reaction by way of transforming the form (its own and that of the encroaching foreign), transcending and transmuting influences while staying rooted in the discourses of locality. This attempt to explicate the said televisual process that happened after the return of democratized broadcasting in the Philippines in 1986 shows that originality in the case of the teleserye manifested its significant conceptualization in various fields—the first being in its “claim” for a name, which is primarily a linguistic conquest. The act of naming, though not orchestrated or performed as a matter of conscious subversion, surfaced in public discourse, as the word and more teleseryes were continuously perpetrated. As also observed, the teleserye has manifested originality in its imaginings of the Filipino experience, from within and without, and through time. It had certainly unpacked the new form offered by the telenovela, restructured its narrative by way instituting its seriality, and re-languaged it, so to speak, “for our own purposes”.

In 2000, at the turn of the century, ABS-CBN soap opera Pangako Sa ‘Yo promised to be the new face of the Philippine soap opera for the new millennium. It promised to be larger than life, to become Philippine drama at its finest. Its multi-character, three generations narrative sought to redefine Pinoy romance by entangling parallel characters in an against-all-odds love cycle. Above all, it introduced the term that basically “Filipinized” the soap opera, making it our own, as the world was struggling to come to terms with globalization. Dubbed as the very first “teleserye”, Pangako Sa ‘Yo was instrumental in founding the idea of a local soap opera tradition, deserving of critical attention and distinct estimation. The “linguistic turn”—the turning into language of this truly Filipino television culture—signified the Philippine soap opera’s coming into its own, many years after the Americans brought it along with broadcasting. The neologism “teleserye” (“tele” for television, and “serye” for series) will mark its 15th year in 2015 with the upcoming remake of the soap featuring the love team Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla, reprising the roles of Kristine Hermosa’s Yna Macaspac and Jericho Rosales’ Angelo Buenavista. Meanwhile, the very fact that the word has stayed on in popular culture, and is in current use by all networks when they refer to their respective soap opera productions, prove that the television genre as Filipino has indeed established itself after it sought to name itself, the way the Latin Americans did with their telenovelas.

But before the promise was the premise: the original Pangako Sa ‘Yo, to my memory, sought to become a different soap opera after its high successful predecessors lorded over the airwaves—these were Mara Clara, Esperanza, and Mula sa Puso. This was towards the end of the Latin American telenovela fever, when Filipino viewers have already started to clamor for fixity and tightness in soap operas. Pangako Sa ‘Yo was true to its precursors’ form, though it aspired for more complexity in its conflict which still propelled the narrative. The length of airing was, of course, still determined by the audience, and the landscape back then was changing. Looking back at Pangako Sa ‘Yo, I can’t help but surmise that it was an experiment of sorts in a broadcasting period that had already seen soap opera resolutions in a span of a few months. For how else can the Filipino epic imagination still be sustained in that new environment, post-Marimar? Pangako Sa ‘Yo’s response was simple: narrate multi-generationally, compress the time periods, make the characters evolve the soonest, and invest on good old hubris. Plus, provide a cinematographic gloss to the soap, add more dimension to the rollercoaster ride of the love stories (in the plural). Since the soap is multi-character too, the subplots have to be put in, though to a certain extent, it became detrimental to other parts of the narrative. Pangako Sa ‘Yo was trailblazing in its own right; like the recently concluded Be Careful with My Heart, it resisted the imposition of the foreign form (in Pangako, the Latin form, in Be Careful, the Korean form) by insisting on what it is—an authentic imagination of Filipino romance experience, in its own time.

Time is again very important to discourse about here as the teleserye has its own temporality. While it had already adapted to the temper of the times with regards to soap opera airing lengths, Pangako Sa ‘Yo elucidates our conception of time as particularly shaped by our relation with the past. The past is never a foreign country to us, as it is as much a part of the present—to a fault. In Pangako Sa ‘Yo, the past is pivotal in the dynamics of the story, and in how the lead characters turned against each other. It is interesting to note that the original’s backstory, the love between Amor Powers and Eduardo Buenavista, played by Eula Valdez and Tonton Gutierrez, turned out to be the most important story. It was a deceptive ploy to put together parallel love stories, and consequent triangles, converging and connecting in a singular plot line. Time then had to be bought in order to carry out this complex project. A good number of episodes had to be mounted to dramatize what I’ll call at this point as the origin story, which in turn heightened the love story of the present. In a way, this is how the very first teleserye claimed its being an epic story—it actually played with time present and time past by not only putting them in predictable chronology, but also putting them in parallel with each other, where the main actors interact in constant tension and flux. More than its production design, scenic settings, realistic references to some of the major events of the day, and even the presentation of alternative ending options, Pangako Sa ‘Yo’s virtue is that of time, which may also be read as the capacity to traverse fictional time and current affairs. The teleserye was bold enough to discuss issues of feudalism, man-made tragedies (remember the Payatas tragedy), political dynasty, organized crime, diasporic migration, and domestic labor, to become a testament of not only the times of the star-crossed lovers, but also of real, historical time.

Space also played an important part in Pangako Sa ‘Yo as it has been clearly located by way of the setting in this first Philippine teleserye. While most soap operas currently running neglect the idea of location in its narrative discourse, Pangako Sa ‘Yo has clearly situated not only Philippine experience, but also Philippine space as meaningful plane of signifying the said experiences. The selection of what seems like the Payatas Landfill to open the soap, where Amor Powers lost her young daughter Yna, recalled back then, the very tragic reality of urban congestion and the sorry state of people making a living through dump. The Buenavista Hacienda meanwhile served as testament to the land reform problems still hounding society. On the other hand, the election scenes in the story portrayed the ruthlessness of our political, as well as our business cultures, both run by the reign of vengeance and greed. On a more interesting note, Pangako Sa ‘Yo as a border-crossing soap has put the Philippines in the map of the global drama world, a space dominated by Hollywood, and other emergent drama cultures like the big telenovela players from Latin America. Aside from performing well in countries from Southeast Asia, Africa, and even America, it also earned a local remake in Cambodia, which is currently on air. In ABS-CBN’s Pangako Sa ‘Yo promotional video used for international trade shows, the word “teleserye” is flashed prominently, identifying the soap opera as a Filipino text. In hindsight, Pangako Sa ‘Yo remarkably carried out the two-fold task of locating at once the Philippine setting, and setting the tone for the teleserye as a global text. These distinctions need to be mentioned now that a new Pangako Sa ‘Yo is set to return to Philippine television, 15 years after it launched the word and the genre.

What then is the promise of this new Pangako Sa ‘Yo? The cast promises to be an interesting one, and the tenor is one of maturity. Jodi Santamaria comes of age here, and she receives a rightful prize after her successful stint by being Be Careful with My Heart’s Maya. She will play the bidang-kontrabida Amor, and is expected to perform exciting dramatic exchanges with Angelica Panganiban, who will play the equally unforgettable archrival Madame Claudia Buenavista. Pangako Sa ‘Yo is primarily a narrative of women, and the confrontation scenes of these two are worth anticipating. Also, there is the “Kathniel” craze to reckon with. As contemporary TV’s most favorite love team, Bernardo and Padilla represent current kilig that never fails to sweep the audience off its feet. It would be interesting to see how their kilig would reinvent the best-remembered kilig of Hermosa and Rosales. What looks promising at this point is the network’s emphasis on the maturity of this new pair—that they are now capable of taking on more serious dramatic endeavors. Pangako Sa ‘Yo could be the coming of age of the two, as it is definitely a coming full circle to Santamaria, who played the role of Angelo’s sister Lia in the first version. Meanwhile, for the teleserye at large, Pangako Sa ‘Yo promises to be another landmark, a highpoint in the continuing development of the Filipino television genre. After 15 years, it looks like the term is here to stay, continuing the definition of the soap opera as truly Filipino, and as worthy global drama for the world to see.